


‘cause I can’t protect you from yourself (but I’ll tell your story well)

by AraV (Zayrastriel)



Category: Twilight Series - Stephenie Meyer
Genre: Depression, F/M, Gen, Meta, mental health
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-02-17
Updated: 2016-02-17
Packaged: 2018-05-21 06:33:03
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,043
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6041767
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zayrastriel/pseuds/AraV
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Rosalie isn’t the only one of the Cullens to have sat through university lectures and submitted essays on human psychology. She is, however, the only one with a PhD in adolescent depression and mental health.</i>
</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>  <i>(Edward raised an eyebrow, Alice giggled, the side of Jasper’s mouth quirked just so, and Emmett straight out laughed. As though Rosalie hasn’t been frozen in late adolescence, in a maelstrom of heartbreak and pain. As though Rosalie could never understand.)</i></p><p> </p><p>Reflections on Bella Swan and mental health.</p>
            </blockquote>





	‘cause I can’t protect you from yourself (but I’ll tell your story well)

**Author's Note:**

> I should note that personally, I'm not a huge fan of Bella - in the same way that I don't think I'd be a fan of any teenage girl's first-person account of their life. But I am a complete anti-fan of the vilification of teenage girls for mental health issues. I don't believe for a second that Stephanie Meyer intended for Bella to exhibit signs of mental illness - but she does. 
> 
> I've chosen Rosalie for this because Rosalie doesn't like Bella as a person - but I believe that Rosalie, more than anyone else, would be deeply invested in protecting teenage girls.
> 
> Because we need to protect teenage girls - from society, and from themselves.
> 
> CW: SAD, depression, anxiety, mention of sexual assault.

Rosalie isn’t the only one of the Cullens to have sat through university lectures and submitted essays on human psychology.

She is, however, the only one with a PhD in adolescent depression.

(Edward raised an eyebrow, Alice giggled, the side of Jasper’s mouth quirked just _so_ , and Emmett straight out laughed. As though Rosalie hasn’t been frozen in late adolescence, in a maelstrom of heartbreak and pain.)

So the thing is, pale Isabella Swan with her dull dark eyes and reticence to speak captures Rosalie’s attention before Edward or Alice have even laid eyes on the girl. Rosalie isn’t Edward or Jasper. She can’t read emotion or thoughts.

But she can _smell_ it, breathe it in deep if she tries (and she does, more than the others might think), and she can practically taste the scent of petrichor that lingers around that girl. Petrichor and sweat, with the tangy edge of steel wool.

* * *

_“I loved the sun and the blistering heat. I loved the vigorous, sprawling city…It [Forks] was too green – an alien planet…”_ (Twilight: Chapter 1)

Rosalie is saving an in-person meeting with Norman E. Rosenthal till after his 70th birthday – she’ll only really have one or two chances, after all, and she’s still holding out for another revolutionary discovery.

But when seasonal affective disorder comes out of the National Institutional Mental Health in 1984, she seizes it as a lifeline. Because Rosalie misses and craves the sunshine that she can no longer safely bask under.  Those scarce moments of bliss, when she and her family linger in secluded forests – they’re her only barrier against stepping into the occasional sunlight that blesses the grey towns she’s forced to live in.

Vampires don’t lose energy, is the thing. That’s what Rosalie’s told, at least, when she asks Carlisle for medical advice. Vampires don’t sleep, vampires don’t feel lethargic. So no matter what her brain wants – release, sleep, _sunlight_ – her body betrays her. A self-diagnosis doesn’t change that, not at all. But it’s something to know that 9.9% of Alaskans become clinically depressed in the winter months. It’s something to know that, in many ways, she’s still human.

It’s not the best part of humanity to retain. But it’s something.

The years after 1984 don’t see a cessation to her yearning for real sunlight against her frozen skin. But Rosalie has a light box shining almost constantly in her room, has successfully talked her family into installing fluorescent lighting in every house they live in.

Isabella Swan comes from a sunny land as bright and burning as its namesake, far from the sleepiness of Forks. Rosalie detests her on sight, but it takes effort to not immediately post a light box to her address.

* * *

_“Forks High School had a frightening total of only three hundred and fifty-seven – now fifty-eight – students…” (_ Twilight: Chapter 1)

The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator doesn’t become popular till after the Second World War, but Rosalie had been keeping an eye on Isabel Myers and Katharine Briggs since it started taking place.  She befriends both women in 1944 – introduces herself as a young housewife eager to escape her domineering husband.

(Emmett finds that hilarious, where Edward or Carlisle would have been grossly offended. It’s one of the reasons she loves him.)

It’s a decent principle, but in the end she’s disappointed.  Kat tells her with absolute certainty that she’s an extroverted intuitive feeling judger. Rosalie has always loved to dress up for balls and gossip with girl-friends; but it leaves her exhausted and drained, leaving her longing for solitude. She’s a scientist – learns languages and literature because even Emmett does, but those are nothing compared to the beauty of quantum physics.

ENFJ. It makes little sense to Rosalie, though the rest of her family loves the idea. When she begins to voice a concern, Edward tells her with more certainty than Kat, that people are really quite simple.

People, as almost a century of the development of psychology has taught Rosalie, are a blend of the simple and the complex and the utterly unknowable. Which means that she doesn’t dislike Bella for the aura of gloom, but because she’s dismissive towards her classmates, to every attempt at kindness offered to her. She dislikes Bella because the girl draws energy from those around her, the way Rosalie never could.

Antisocial extroverts, social introverts. ENFJ. People aren't simple. 

* * *

_“I felt my breathing gradually creeping toward hyperventilation as I approached the door.”_

“ _…several people behind us were walking close enough to eavesdrop. I hoped I wasn’t getting paranoid._ ” (Twilight: Chapter 1)

Edward is the oldest among them, after Carlisle. But for all that he is over a century old, for all that he reads surface thoughts the way people read books – or maybe _because_ of that – he doesn’t seem to realise that there’s more than a surface. That sorrow is deep and aching, that it lingers in the soul even when it’s swept from conscious thought.

Carlisle is old-school – eager to cure all of the physical, convinced of the invisibility of the mental. Esme sees depression in tangible things (her dead child, Rosalie’s gang rape), and not in the slow accumulation of a thousand cuts over a life lived with a brain that doesn’t feel quite right.

Jasper is a soldier, and an addict. Empathy aside, school leaves him alert and terrified, focussed more on resisting the urge to bite into warm flesh than on the outside world. Alice doesn’t recall years spent in an asylum, plagued by hallucinations.

And Emmett – brave, warm, honest. Rosalie’s sun, Rosalie’s love.

Emmett has never sat in a darkened room, staring listlessly at a wall in lieu of sleep. He’s never had the sort of panic attack which still plagues Rosalie, which leaves her gasping desperately for air she no longer needs.

There are many things Rosalie no longer needs. She no longer needs to worry whether people stare at her in judgement, whether their disdain over her clothes or her hair will leave her outcast. There’s a family around her now, and even if her hair was matted with dirt and her clothes sewn from a potato sack, disdain would never be the first thing on an onlooker’s mind.

That doesn’t mean she doesn’t remember.


End file.
